Agents of Change

  ***

  Early the next morning, I drive to Maxwell to deliver my letter of resignation to Mr. Grace. He’s not in but I’m able to hand the letter to his assistant. I don’t like quitting jobs in this manner—even when I worked at the movies as a teen—but when an opportunity like this comes along, you do what you have to do.

  I get back home in time to meet Elena at my townhouse again. This time, I give her my signed contract.

  After once again failing to strike up conversation with Jimenez while on our way to Lincoln, I begin to value her curt personality. It’s easy to underestimate the power of a silent car ride; it gives me time to think and focus on the task at hand. I can also appreciate Jimenez because she doesn’t strike me as the judgmental type, either. She remains remarkably silent as I jam out to Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down A Dream.

  Halfway through the chorus, I stop singing and look over at Jimenez. Her sunglasses hide her eyes while the rest of her face remains motionless. Both of her hands remain firmly affixed to the steering wheel.

  “What?” she says.

  “Nothing. Just … are you annoyed or something?”

  “Would you like me to be?”

  I shrug. “I got kind of carried away with the song there.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I can appreciate that, much in the same way Lenin appreciated Marx. See, given the color of my skin, it’s not uncommon for me to get razzed for my eclectic musical choices. With Elena, it would appear that I never have to worry about that stuff.

  From Jimenez’s Jetta, I can now see Lincoln High, its large, brick structure looming large in the otherwise residential neighborhood. We turn into the school’s parking lot and slide into a spot far from the building’s main entrance.

  I open the yellow folder on my lap and look at the photo ID of Jenny Cooper once again. The agency did a really good job of finding someone who likes like a vibrant teenage girl. Through the faded ink, I can make Jenny out, full of life and, no doubt, popular with her peers.

  “You should change before someone sees you,” Jimenez says.

  “You’re right. It’s morphin time!” I proclaim with a laugh, recalling the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, one of my favorite childhood television shows. I wait for a reaction from Jimenez. “Nothing? Not even a groan?”

  My moment of nostalgia only elicits a blank stare.

  Swoosh!

  I look in the side-view mirror and see a full set of blonde curls to go along with blue eyes and a cute, unblemished face.

  Freaky.

  As I smile, I can honestly say that my teeth have never been straighter. My rendition of Jenny is solely based on the headshot in the ID. I decided on a slim build, about five and a half feet tall.

  “You still have your earpiece?”

  “Wearing it now,” I say, freaked out by my shrill voice as I tap my tragus. I then think to ask a question that’s been bugging me since delving deeper into the A of I manual last night. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know what I don’t know understand? Instead of making every agent go through the Change Machine procedure, why not just give every agent a replica Arrowhead? It’d be a lot less painful and not irreversible—you could just take it back when they quit.”

  “Yes but think about what would happen if someone lost it. What if it fell into the wrong hands?”

  “Okay, but how do we know the Agency of Justice isn’t making replicas?”

  “They’d need the original. It’s possible they’ve done that in the past but, right now, the A of I has it.”

  “Interesting. I would think the A of J would push for replicas since they can’t seem to get the machine right. You know, you guys never did tell me what exactly it is that they do.”

  Jimenez nods, as though acknowledging that I’m owed at least that explanation despite her preference for silence. “Back when they were created, the agencies had an agreement that they would carry out very different types of missions. One agency would look after the downtrodden while the other would seek out those who haven’t paid for their crimes against humanity. Remember when bin Laden died? That was the A of J.”

  “Really?” I say. “I get it. It’s like they were trying to create a Utopia.”

  “In theory, yes. But some might say that the Agency of Justice takes things to the extreme.”

  “Define extreme.”

  “Remember the fight that killed Hamilton’s subject in the subway near City Hall? We’re convinced an Agent of Justice started it.”

  “They sacrificed the safety of others to punish one guy?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Why doesn’t the A of I do anything about it?”

  “The two agencies have a consonance. They’ve both promised to stay out of each other’s way.”

  I shake my head as I put the lanyard ID around my neck and peek at the photo of Josh in the folder one last time. There are those among my brethren who would call Josh a wigger. I don’t subscribe to the theory that someone is supposed to act and dress a certain way based on the color of their skin. Still, it won’t be hard to spot Josh given his style of dress. Northeast Philly has never been known for its diversity.

  “You should probably get moving,” Jimenez says. “Josh will be in the cafeteria soon.”

  I close the folder and hand it to her.

  “Remember, be patient. Introduce yourself. Observe him.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, opening the door. “I got it.”

  “I’ll be here in the car.”

  Nodding as I climb out of Elena’s car, I close the door behind me. I walk not four steps before I hear her voice again.

  “You walk like a man!” she calls from the car.

  I nod and start walking again, trying to put a little more wiggle in my midsection.

  “Much better!” I look back at the Jetta and see, for a brief moment, what I believe to be a faint smile on Jimenez’s face to go along with a shake of the head.

  As I walk along the side of the school building, I give it a longer look. The school is an older, two-story building with an off-white cinderblock exterior and windows laced with bars. Lincoln isn’t in a bad neighborhood but you can’t tell by the windows or the uninviting wrought iron fence surrounding the school’s grounds.

  Before I reach the front of the building, I come across a red metallic door. On the other side of the door, I hear the din of rowdy teenagers. Either this is an unruly classroom or I’ve found the cafeteria. I start to put my face up to the window to peer inside but am startled when the door flies open.

  A chubby boy, milk carton in hand, motions for me to enter. “Sneaking into school?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Nice,” he says with an admiring nod of the head.

  I enter the building, greeted by the zoo that is the cafeteria. It’s just about everything I remember from high school, except more exaggerated and more cartoonish. Maybe it’s because I’m now old enough to notice the nuances of the high school social scene.

  I peruse the cafeteria and catch Josh Jenner sitting by himself at the end of a table in a corner of the room as he jots down notes in a notebook. Perhaps he’s completing last night’s homework at the last minute.

  Those were the days.

  “Get some food. It’ll help you blend in,” Jimenez says in my ear.

  She doesn’t have to tell me twice. I’m famished. Besides, I’m curious to see the crap they’re feeding kids these days anyway. On my way to the food, I pass a trio of girls, all of them brunettes. One of them is Latin while the other two are white. They all give me a hard look up and down. I’m initially flattered, holding their collective gaze until I realize that I, too, am female.

  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I say under my breath. I turn my attention back to the food and pick up a tray in the process.

  Behind the customary glass sits chicken nuggets, burgers, fries and pizza, a
ll of which appears to have been sitting out too long. The lunch lady grabs a pair of tongs, picks up a plate and gives me that what do you want look.

  “Can I have some nuggets and fries, please?” I sound so much friendlier as a female. No wonder girls always get what they want.

  The lady nods her head and starts placing the junk on the plate. Not only does this food look stale, it sounds the part as it clanks on the plate. As the lady hands me the food, her apathetic gaze turns into a quizzical one.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I say, playing with my lanyard so as to hide the ID without calling attention to it. “I just moved here from Ohio. It’s my first day.”

  “Weird,” the lady says with a shrug. “I could’ve sworn I’ve seen you before.”

  I grab my tray and start walking across the cafeteria, suddenly realizing that I didn’t get anything to drink. Doesn’t matter. If I have my druthers, I’ll have this kid turned around in no time.

  I close in on Josh. He continues writing with his right hand while leaning his head on his left. As I draw closer, though, I notice that he’s not doing homework. Instead, he’s writing as a teenage girl would write in her diary. No textbook, no worksheet, nothing but the thoughts of an angst-ridden teenage boy. When he takes a break from his writing to look at the cafeteria’s clock, I decide I have one chance to see what makes this kid tick. With a wink of my eye, his notebook slides off the table.

  “Let me get that for you,” I say.

  I put my tray down next to Josh’s and walk behind him to pick up the notebook. “Sorry about that. Let me find your place.” I skim through the book as much as I can, finding nothing of substance.

  “Give me that shit!” he says, snatching the book from me. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Oh, hell no.

  I was going to be nice to this kid but it sounds like he needs a stiff kick in the ass. The A of I’s suicide literature didn’t say anything about foul-mouthed teenage boys.

  Before I cuss the boy out, I watch him flip through the pages in his book and notice a page laced with nothing but the same phrase: I wish you would just die. The phrase comes in all varieties of lettering: large, small, thick, thin, lower case, all caps, chicken scratch, and cursive. While the kid hasn’t done anything to endear himself to me, Jimenez and her crew weren’t kidding, he needs an intervention.

  I sit down next to Josh and he immediately grows uncomfortable as he continues to write. I take a deep breath before engaging him again. “So what’s your name?”

  “Josh,” he says, never looking away from his notebook.

  “I’m Jenny.” I extend my hand for a shake but he ignores it. “What are you writing?”

  The boy continues to give me the silent treatment as he slides his notebook further out of my view. I’ve heard of some people being tough nuts to crack but this guy’s a macadamia.

  “Is something bothering you?” I say.

  He shoots me a look before turning back to his notebook.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  I take another deep breath.

  “Walk away, Newsome,” I hear Jimenez say. I ponder her directive, noting that she’s been at this a lot longer than I have. However, I’m not sure when I will get this kind of individual time with Josh again. Given what I saw in his notebook, and the fact that Jimenez didn’t see it, I’d rather not tempt fate.

  Screw it.

  “Look,” I say, “whatever it is you’re going through, it’s not your fault.”

  The boy slams his book closed and stares into my eyes. “Are you deaf? I said leave me the fuck alone.” It’s all I can do to keep my eyes from popping out of my head as Josh stands up and walks away.

  “Pendejo,” Jimenez says. I’m not sure what that means but it didn’t sound at all like praise.

  “I’ll get him after school.”

  “No. We’re done for the day.”

  You know that feeling you get after you royally mess up? Yeah, I’m that guy right now. It’s not a good feeling and it’s hard to ignore it, no matter how many times you tell yourself what’s done is done. The feeling weighs on your body as well as your mind. I can feel my temperature rise, especially in my face, as I turn and watch Josh leave the cafeteria.

  When I scan the scene, I notice that many of the other students are now watching me. Initially, I think that it’s just the boys being boys but the girls are staring, too, much like the trio of plastics I encountered before I got my food.

  But this look is different, disconcerting even. The boys and the girls are all whispering amongst themselves. I turn my back to everyone and face the wall at the back of the cafeteria. I look at the skin on my hands. Fair. I run my fingers through my hair. Flaxen. I check my clothes. Feminine and clean.

  “I’ll be there soon,” I manage to finally tell Elena. “I need to use the restroom.”

  “I’ll be here.” Not that Jimenez is a joy to be around to begin with, but this is one time I definitely won’t look forward to seeing her.

  Out in the hallway, the loud roar of the cafeteria quiets to mere ambient noise. The fluorescent lights that dot the hall’s ceiling buzz loudly. To the left I see two restrooms, a boys’ room next to a girls’ room.

  I let the cafeteria door close behind me and head for the ladies room. Ahead of me is the same trio of girls who so closely scrutinized me earlier. After they enter the bathroom, I take a look at the sign on the boys’ door before looking at the sign on girls’ door. It’s funny how something as simple as the silhouette of a dress can make such a big difference. If not for that, those quasi-stick figures are the same people. My choice shouldn’t be this hard.

  “Can’t do it,” I whisper to myself. I check to see if anyone’s watching before entering the boys’ room.

  Thankfully, it’s empty.

  I can’t imagine going to a restroom without a urinal, even if it’s not anatomically possible for me to use one at the moment. When I enter a stall, I can’t bring myself to squat. I love the female anatomy but waste elimination is one aspect of it I wish not to explore.

  Swoosh!

  As I relieve myself, I replay the encounter with Josh in my head. Sure, I could have left when Jimenez directed me to but doing so would have felt incomplete. Then again, I recall Elena telling me back at the branch that suicides require the most patience. If I did blow it, if I did wreck any chance we had at saving Josh, he may be as good as dead.

  I flush, wash my hands, and look at my natural face. One drawback to this job is that none of my subjects will ever get to know the real me. Can’t say I’m all that interesting, though. If I was suicidal and could choose between being saved by Jenny Cooper or Calvin Newsome, I’d choose Jenny.

  Swoosh!

  I walk back to the restroom door and it nearly hits me as it flies open. A teacher wearing glasses and a mustache walks past me and starts unzipping his pants. Expecting to be scolded, I scurry out of the restroom, careful to let my arms flail like a skinny teenage girl.

  Back out in the hallway, the bell rings, signaling a mass exodus from the cafeteria. With my sights set on the cafeteria door, I fight upstream against the current of teenagers. As I finally reach the door, many of the kids yell at me, scolding me for going the wrong way.

  “Excuse me, sir,” a deep voice says from behind me, near the restroom. Through force of habit, I turn to look at the voice. Standing against the wall is an older man, maybe in his fifties, wearing a polyester suit and tie, and he’s looking directly at me.

  “Oh, I forgot something in there,” I say, shocked by my suddenly masculine voice.

  As the man approaches me, I look at my hands once again and realize my skin has darkened. I pat my head only to feel the nappy tuft on top of it.

  What the hell is going on here?

  “Can I see some identification?”

  My heart pounding through my chest, my temperature rising again, I c
an’t manage anything out of my mouth, not even a grunt. The man notices the lanyard around my neck and lifts the ID card closer to his eyes. After taking a long look at it, the man looks at me once more before looking at the ID one last time. He lifts the lanyard off of my neck and places it in his pocket. His hand then moves from his pocket to a walkie-talking on his hip.

  “This is Reidhead,” the man says. “I need an officer to meet me in Room 101.”

  My mind is telling me to run but my legs have turned to lead. “Don’t say anything,” Jimenez says in my ear.

  “Ten-four,” says a voice on the walkie. “Officer Perriman will be there shortly.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” the man says.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  He nudges me forward “If you’re thinking of running, don’t. By the time you get outside, there’ll be an army of cops waiting to arrest you.”

  What happened? I know for a fact I changed into Jenny before leaving the bathroom. I must’ve changed back before I left and I must’ve been so focused on my ruse that I ignored the fact that I was suddenly wearing clothes from the men’s section at Gap. This might explain my uneventful encounter with the teacher in the boys’ room.

  “Where did you find this ID?” Reidhead says.

  I lower my head and ignore him. He might not have read me my Miranda Rights but now’s a good time to utilize them.

  Reidhead stays behind me as he ushers me down the hallway, past the cafeteria. As I pass students along the way, I see all of their faces as they can’t help but look at the spectacle before them. When they stop conversing about their crushes or the absurd amount of homework their history teacher assigns them, I wonder if they are as shocked by all of this as I am or if this just provides a few moments of entertainment in an otherwise boring day.

  As Reidhead and I turn a corner just before entering the school’s main office, I turn my head to look back down the hallway. In that instant, I see someone come out of the girls’ restroom wearing a light blue Phillies cap and sunglasses. I didn’t think you could wear hats and sunglasses in school.

  In the office, my captor leads me past the front desk where a pair of secretaries, one young, one old, answer phones and field questions from visitors. Reidhead and I pass through a waist-high swinging door, taking us behind the front desk. To our right is a door with a name and title plastered on its window: Geoffrey Reidhead, Principal.

  Great, in all my years of schooling, not once was I ever sent to the principal’s office. Who knew my first trip to the dungeon would be after my twenty-ninth birthday?

  We turn around as a school district cop enters the main office. As he walks in our direction, Reidhead points to a bench behind the front desk. “Stay here.”

  He opens the door to his office and follows the cop into it. I take a seat as the two gentlemen discuss things behind closed doors.

  “Where are you?” Jimenez says.

  “The main office,” I say, my head down as I try to muffle my speech. “The principal’s talking to a school cop.”

  “Shit. What do they look like they’re saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reidhead slaps the ID down on his desk and points to it.

  “They’re definitely talking about the ID, though.”

  “Dammit.”

  I’m apparently not doing a very good job staying silent. The younger secretary turns and takes a peek at me.

  “Elena, are there any cops over by where we parked?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I’m going to run.”

  “No. Stay there. The A of J could still be out there.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Agent of Justice. There had to be one around, that’s why you lost your power. Did you see anyone strange?”

  “Actually, yeah, there was this girl wearing sunglasses.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “How the hell would I know? She had sunglasses on.”

  “Just stay there, Calvin,” she says after a lengthy silence.

  “Why? I’m already exposed.” I’ve also been given an opportunity thanks to the stupidity of the two men in the principal’s office. Reidhead’s obviously not a cop and don’t even get me started on school cops. When I got the snot beat out of me in middle school, they were nowhere to be found. “I have to try, Elena.”

  “Calvin, wait—”

  I take off and, with a thrust of my hand, throw the swinging door wide open, allowing for an easy exit. Behind me, I hear the two ladies yell at me to stop before yelling the principal’s name.

  Out of the main office, I look to my right and see three cop cars outside. I decide, instead, to turn left and go back where I came from. The hallway is littered with teens going to and from class, hanging out at their lockers. I look back and see no sign of the cop or the principal. Still, I take no chances, pushing a few kids aside with a stiff arm, a cold shoulder or a telekinetic thrust of the hand.

  “Sorry,” I say, jumping, dodging and contorting my way through the crowd. Some kids are knocked to the ground while some are knocked into their lockers. Nerds, jocks, cheerleaders, druggies, hipsters and band geeks all form one colorful blur as I race past them.

  “What are you doing?” Jimenez says.

  “Getting out of here.”

  When I reach the cafeteria, I push open the double doors and head straight for the door through which I first entered the school, ignoring the teeming mass of youth in the lunch room.

  Outside, as my feet find the pavement, the sun shines on me like a spotlight. Fifty yards away, I see the back of Jimenez’s Jetta. She was right; there are no cops out here. Now on the lot’s asphalt, I hear Elena turn the ignition, giving me that extra push as I draw nearer to her car.

  “Look out!” she screams in my earpiece.

  In my periphery, a police cruiser hooks around and comes to a screeching halt in front of me. This cruiser belongs to the real Philly PD and its driver jumps out of the car and points a gun directly at my head.

  “Don’t move,” he says.

  I reach for the sky as my heart pounds against the inner walls of my chest.

  The cop crosses the front of his cruiser, pulls my arms down and lays a pair of cuffs on my wrists. “You have the right remain silent.”

  “Pay attention to where they take you,” Jimenez says, “and let me know as soon as you can. Don’t tell them anything.”

  When the cop eases me into the backseat of his cruiser, it occurs to me that this is the first time that Jimenez actually sounds sympathetic.

  I don’t know what I’m being charged with but, judging by how animated Reidhead was while talking about the ID, I suspect that it’s more than trespassing.